UNIX/IRAF Site Manager's Guide

3.4. Software management tools

IRAF software management is performed with a standard set of tools, consisting of the tasks in the SOFTOOLS package, plus the host system editors and debuggers. Some of the most important and often used tools for IRAF software development and software maintenance are the following.

mkhelpdb

Updates the HELP database of the core IRAF system or an external package. The core system, and each external package, has its own help database. The help database is the machine independent file helpdb.mip in the package library (LIB directory). The help database file is generated with mkhelpdb by compiling the root.hd file in the same directory.

mkpkg

The "make-package" utility. Used to make or update package trees. Will update the contents of the current directory tree. When run at the root iraf directory, updates the full IRAF system; when run at the root directory of an external package, updates the external package. Note that updating the core IRAF system does not update any external packages (including NOAO). When updating an external package, the package name must be specified, e.g., "mkpkg -p noao".

rmbin

Descends a directory tree or trees, finding and optionally listing or deleting all binary files therein. This is used, for example, to strip the binaries from a directory tree to leave only sources, to force mkpkg to do a full recompile of a package, or to locate all the binaries files for some reason. IRAF has its own notion of what a binary file is. By default, files with the "known" file extensions (.[aoe], .[xfh] etc.) are classified as binary or text (machine independent) files immediately, while a heuristic involving examination of the file data is used to classify other files. Alternatively, a list of file extensions to be searched for may optionally be given.

rtar,wtar

These are the portable IRAF tarfile writer (wtar) and reader (rtar). About the only reasons to use these with the UNIX versions of IRAF are if one wants to move only the machine independent or source files (wtar, like rmbin, can discriminate between machine generated and machine independent files), or if one is importing files written to a tarfile on a VMS/IRAF system, where the files are blank padded and the trailing blanks need to be stripped with rtar.

xc

The X (SPP) compiler. This is analogous to the UNIX cc except that it can compile ".x" or SPP source files, knows how to link with the IRAF system libraries and the shared library, knows how to read the environment of external packages, and so on.

The SOFTOOLS package contains other tasks of interest, e.g., a program mktags for making a tags file for the vi editor, a help database examine tool, and other tasks. Further information on these tasks is available in the online help pages.